What is a web series? Meaning, length and examples

A web series is a run of short episodes, scripted or unscripted, made for the internet and released on sites and apps such as YouTube, Vimeo or TikTok instead of on a TV channel. Episodes are short, usually 3 to 15 minutes, and budgets are far smaller than in television. One episode is often called a webisode. The form appeared in the mid-1990s and grew fast once broadband made online video practical.

What is a web series, in plain words?

It is a show built for the screen in your pocket or on your desk, not for a TV schedule. It still has episodes, recurring characters and usually a story that carries over, much like a TV series. The difference is where it lives, how long each part runs and how much it costs to make.

Wikipedia gives two other names for the same thing: short-form series and web show. The internet also lets a web series do things TV can't. Some are interactive, and some spread one story across videos, blogs and photos at once, as The Spot did in 1995.

How long is a web series episode?

A typical episode runs between 3 and 15 minutes, and some go up to 20. Web festivals usually set 20 minutes as the ceiling, and some ask for less than 15. Anything past half an hour per episode is normally treated as long-form television, whatever platform it plays on.

The Emmys draw a similar line. In 2016 the Television Academy described a short form series as one with at least six episodes averaging 15 minutes or less, shown over the air, on cable, by satellite or on the internet. Wikipedia's article notes that the Emmy short-form range today is two to 20 minutes per episode.

Web series, TV series, streaming series: what's the difference?

Length and home decide most of it. A web series is short and made for websites and apps. A TV series runs on a channel. A streaming series is made for a service like Netflix and has full-length episodes. A microdrama is shorter still, shot vertically for phones.

One catch. In India, "web series" is the usual word for any streaming show, even one with hour-long episodes. So a headline about a "new web series" from Mumbai may mean a full-scale streaming drama.

If a streaming show tells one complete story in a fixed number of episodes, it has its own name. Our guide to what a limited series is explains that format and how it differs from a miniseries.

What counts as a web series?

Researchers at the University of Victoria's Web Soda project set a simple test: the series must be made for the internet, not moved there from TV, and have a continuous story, recurring characters and a consistent tone. A show without a running plot can still qualify if each episode keeps the same host, look and humor.

That last point matters for review and commentary shows. Their example is Zero Punctuation, a video game review series with no plot, which still reads as a series because every episode looks and sounds the same.

The test also rules things out. A TV episode uploaded to YouTube is not a web series, and neither is a one-off viral clip. Japanese studios have their own term for animation that premieres online: original net animation, or ONA. If you're new to the medium, start with what anime is.

Where did web series come from?

They started in 1995. That April, an episode of the Bloomington, Indiana public-access show Rox went online, and the same year Scott Zakarin launched The Spot, a soap told through photos, video and blogs. In 1999 Showtime licensed the animated WhirlGirl, the first independent web series picked up by a national network.

Broadband changed the scale. The Brothers Chaps launched the Flash cartoon Homestar Runner in 2000. Between 2003 and 2006 independent shows found big audiences, above all Rooster Teeth's Red vs. Blue, which was distributed through YouTube, Revver and the studio's own site. YouTube itself launched in early 2005.

Then the studios came in. In 2008 ABC, NBC and Bravo released web series of their own, and Joss Whedon self-financed Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, a musical in three acts of about 14 minutes each, written during the 2007–2008 Writers Guild strike. The first web series festival, the Los Angeles Web Series Festival, opened in 2009.

Which famous shows started as web series?

The best-known jump is Broad City. Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson made it as an independent web series between 2009 and 2011, and Comedy Central turned it into a sitcom that ran for five seasons, from 22 January 2014 to 28 March 2019.

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries took another route. Created by Hank Green and Bernie Su, it retold Pride and Prejudice as video blogs on a YouTube channel, ran 100 episodes from 9 April 2012 to 28 March 2013, and in 2013 became the first web series to win an Emmy, for Original Interactive Program.

Rooster Teeth moved on from Red vs. Blue to the computer-animated RWBY in 2013. In 2010 the twin brothers Cary and Michael Huang posted the first episode of Battle for Dream Island, which started a whole genre of game-show parodies with talking objects. For more animated work, see our cartoons section.

Do web series win awards?

Yes, at their own ceremonies and at the big ones. The Webby Awards date from 1996, the Streamy Awards began in 2009, and the IAWTV Awards followed in 2012. The Emmys, Canadian Screen Awards and BAFTA all now have short-form categories.

Festivals run the other side of it. Wikipedia lists Melbourne WebFest, Seoul Webfest, Webfest Berlin, NYC Web Fest, LA Web Fest and Vancouver Web Fest among them. Most ask for two or three finished episodes, which is a fair hint at what the industry treats as the minimum for a "series."

What other formats and story terms should you know?

A web series is a container, and the stories inside it borrow tools from older forms. Many short shows end each episode on a reveal, so it helps to know what a plot twist is and how it differs from a cliffhanger.

Horror online has its own tradition of short scary stories passed from site to site; read what creepypasta is for that side of internet storytelling.

Some short series are built around one big question. A common one is whether a person should learn the day of their own death, and our piece on whether you would want to know when you die looks at what surveys found and how films have played with the idea. The full list of format guides lives in formats and genres.